B.9 The history file

The file ‘$CVSROOT/CVSROOT/history’ is used
to log information for the history command
(see section A.12 history--Show status of files and users). This file must be created to turn
on logging. This is done automatically if the
cvs init command is used to set up the
repository (see section 2.3 Creating a repository).

The file format of the ‘history’ file is
documented only in comments in the CVS source
code, but generally programs should use the cvs
history command to access it anyway, in case the
format changes with future releases of CVS.